Join us online Wednesday, June 1 at 6 p.m. EDT for a conversation about perhaps the most powerful and misunderstood institution in the world: The Federal Reserve. "It has come to backstop the global market system, and in recent years it has created a bubble in everything that is now, slowly but surely, starting to burst," Rana Faroohar of The Financial Times writes about the new book, The Fed Unbound: Central Banking in a Time of Crisis, by Lev Menand. "As a consequence, the Fed is trying to walk an impossible line between managing the inflation it helped to set off and the recession that may follow as it tries to stabilise prices."

Join Lev Menand, Columbia associate professor of law and former senior advisor to the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, Simon Johnson, MIT Sloan professor and coauthor of 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and The Next Financial Meltdown, and Katharina Pistor, Columbia professor of law and author of The Code of Capital: How Law Creates Wealth and Inequality in a conversation moderated by Nicolas Lemann, Columbia Global Reports director and author of Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream.